Salesforce.com launches Chatter Free application

Salesforce.com has announced the launch of Chatter Free, a new no-cost edition of its popular Chatter application.

The new service is available to all employees of current Salesforce.com customers who want to use the enterprise social-collaboration tool to communicate with their colleagues.

Chatter works on a similar principle to Facebook and Twitter, with profiles, status updates and real-time feeds, allowing users to follow people, along with business processes and application data.

The Salesforce.com application has proved to be a hit in its first few months of operation, with over 60,000 companies deploying Chatter since its launch.

Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive officer of Salesforce.com, said: "The fact that more than 60,000 enterprises have deployed Chatter within the first five months is amazing and the Chatter Free social invites are going to take Chatter enterprise-wide."

The cloud computing company explained having status updates from important projects means workers can always be kept in the loop about the progress of such initiatives.